Hi Lauren,
I appreciate your perspective on the potential roles of ChatGPT in our educational experience. I do, however, think an appropriate dose of scepticism of the technology gets easily washed away in the hype that currently surrounds it. For example, explaining a concept and summarising a reading are two functions of ChatGPT that you mentioned, but the language model doesn’t actually know anything and can’t really even read. It only generates the most probable sentence word by word, making it prone to hallucinations, where it generates probabilistically sound responses that are either factually inaccurate or complete nonsense. What is the purpose of a bot that will summarise a reading when you have to read the whole thing yourself anyway to make sure it didn’t get anything wrong or make anything up? The video you included pitches ChatGPT as a tool to replace specialized labour, but can the model that tells you to put glue in your pizza sauce really generate a press release that can replace your marketing manager? Not to mention the environmental implications. As with all innovations, we need to be open-minded, but we also need to be realistic about the true capabilities of any given tool.
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